… A data leak on a system run by a state-owned
utility company Indane allowed anyone to download private information
on all Aadhaar holders, exposing their names, their unique 12-digit
identity numbers, and information about services they are connected
to, such as their bank details and other private information.

… Yet the Indian authorities did nothing for
weeks to fix the flaw. ZDNet spent more than a month trying
to contact the Indian authorities, but nobody responded to our
repeated emails.

We later contacted the Indian Consulate in New
York and alerted Devi Prasad Misra, consul for trade and customs.
Over two weeks, this issue was explained in detail, and we responded
to many follow-up questions. A week passed, and the vulnerability
was still not fixed. At the start of this week, we told the consul
that we would publish our story on Friday and requested comment from
the Indian government.

The consul did not respond to that last email. At
the time of publishing, the affected system was still online and
vulnerable – but, within hours after our story posted, the affected
endpoint was pulled offline.

A report in American tech website ZDNet
has claimed a breach in the firewall of an unnamed state-owned
utility that uses Aadhaar
for authenticating users of its services. The Unique Identification
Authority of India (UIDAI)
dismissed the ZDNet claims as “baseless and irresponsible”,
asserting that Aadhaar details “remain safe and secure”. “There
is no truth in the story as there has been absolutely no breach of
UIDAI’s Aadhar database,” it said.

Marquis
ID Systems, which issues state driver’s licenses
and ID cards, reported Thursday that a system crash in September
resulted in the loss of scans of sensitive personal documents that
might prove irretrievable.

The
“multiple hard disk crash,” as Marquis described it,
coincided with a failure of
the company’s backup system and affects roughly 66,500
Hawaii residents.

Zanifesto
is a free infographic creation tool. I tried it out this week to see
if I could make a good looking infographic. I almost successful in
that endeavor. Zanifesto has excellent templates for making
infographics. The shortcoming of the service is that it wasn't all
that easy to edit the templates. For example, in the template that I
selected there was one element that I wanted to resize and slightly
shift its position. That seems like it should be easy, but after
many tries I got frustrated and just deleted it altogether. Changing
fonts was almost as frustrating.

If you're looking for inspiration for an
infographic, Zanifesto
is useful for that purpose. I would look at the templates for
inspiration and then use something else like Canva or even Google
Drawings to make my infographic.

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.